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Thursday, 22 January 2015

The Silly QEP

Briefly: The Quebec Education Plan (QEP) is a bloated 517 page document filled with ambiguous crap and buzzwords. Education professors in Quebec seem to be coerced by some mystical force to include the QEP in their university courses. But each new time I'm forced to analyze, my criticisms of it get harsher and harsher. I believe we're supposed to show great respect for this document as it defines the teaching profession in the province, but I just can't.

I was amused by my findings this time and thought I'd include them here for posterity. Enjoy:

2) List the main features of the QEP and how you make sense of it.

The QEP is very wide in scope and in my opinion, vague and unfocussed. Even though the document(s) contain many diagrams with arrows and coloured sections, one could easily swap the placement of diagram labels (even though one label may be pointing to another, or in different coloured sections) with no loss of meaning. To demonstrate my point, I've attached a picture of a game I made - fill in the QEP diagram!

The game is impossible. This is because the positions of the labels are meaningless. So we're left with a list of items like "simulation activities" and "hands-on activities". Do teachers need to know that "simulation activites" are... what, good? Perhaps because I'm not aiming to become a certified teacher I can show a lot of irreverence here. But I'd like to suggest that these labels, along with many other things in the QEP, are completely pointless and a waste of a teacher's time.

Also from the QEP: "Science is a means of analyzing the world around us." If a science teacher isn't already aware of that, forget reading the QEP because they should not be a science teacher. So my main point here is that the QEP should be one tenth its size. But perhaps the writers would feel they were not doing their job if they produced a shorter document.

The curriculum requirements are probably the most valuable part of the document(s). There's actually great value in listing in point form different science topics that should be covered. This could be a huge help to teachers who are preparing their course material - documents like the QEP should help teachers, not confound them with ambigous nonsense.